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| | == Agency and Education == |
| <p class="b3">A Self—Forever Forming</p><p class="b2" style="margin-top: -30px;">The story of my life and and self-formation</p>
| | === A Study of Self-Formation and Formative Justice === |
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| <!-- <table class="timeline"><tr><td class="year"></td><td class="item"></td><td class="pdf"></td></tr></table> -->
| | ==== [[A&E/Intro|Introduction: Three Selves—Objective, Subjective, and Reflective]] ==== |
| <h3>Getting started, 1939-1965</h3>
| | === A Case Study: My Formative Experience === |
| <div class="boxit rmcc" style="margin-left: 50px;"><p class="cent b1">Origial Ignorance</p>As we are newly born, all of us know nothing about parents and their world of experience, about their and other's situations in time and place. Our natality inserts us into a full, actively developing world, uniquely situating us in it. As instances of self-maintaining life, we are thoroughly ignorant about what we can and should do. Knowing nothing, each newborn must recognize, understand, and judge its given circumstances, discovering how to act purposefully with and upon them and thereby experience the contingency of actuality. . . .</div>
| | ==== [[A&E/Start|Getting started, 1939-1965: Childhood, Youth, and Education]] ==== |
| <p class="year b1">Hello.</p><p class="item">I'm Robbie, officially Robert Oliver McClintock, but I've always preferred Robbie and here's my story, which began in the French Hospital, Manhattan, on August 17th, 1939.</p>
| | ==== [[A&E/Cvic|Civic Humanism—1960-1985]] ==== |
| <p class="item">My birth nearly killed my mother. She suffered a catastrophic loss of blood in an emergency Cesarian operation. As an infant, she had contracted polio and spent a year-plus in a sanatorium in Bismarck, ND, which left her with a gimp arm, a short leg, and a strong will, as well as the narrowed cervical canal that I couldn't get through. My father, as happens, had an easier time with my birth than mother did. He had the wrong blood type for the transfusions she needed and had to stand by while an orderly went out on the street to find a volunteer with the right type to give her lifesaving blood. Yeah, that sounded apocryphal when I heard it much later, but blood banks weren't common in hospitals then and the French Hospital was pretty small. But who knows? I'm here now, 86 years later telling my tale, and after several weeks recuperating mother was herself again, filling out her 95, as sharp and active as before.</p>
| | ==== [[A&E/Tech|The Accidental Technologist—1980-2005]] ==== |
| | | ==== [[A&E/Enough|What Is Enough?—2000-on]] ==== |
| <p class="year b1">Parentage</p><p class="item">Unbeknownst to me during the fraught hours of my birth, I was beginning life with significant advantages, thanks to both my parents. By separate routes, each in their '20s came east to New York from the west, taking root in Manhattan in the mid 1920s. It may seem unusual to note differences between oneself and ones parents, but I think it both interesting and significant that I was born in New York, an affluent Manhattanite by ascription, while each of my parents became New Yorkers by aspiration and achievement. If you follow on, you'll have opportunities to judge whether this difference may be a key to much significance, but for now, to get a sense of my parents' lives, let's give them names and get them from their birthplaces to the city.</p>
| | === [[A&E/Sum|Summing Up: On the Limits and Power of Formative Education]] === |
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| <p class="item">I'll start with my father—his path was pretty straight. Franklin Trunkey McClintock, "Kewp," owing to his childhood resemblance to a kewpie doll, grew up in Spokane, Washington, where his family owned a flush business servicing logging camps through the Pacific Northwest. He was smart and sensitive, and I've decided from various clues that he was pampered at home and bullied in school and became strongly averse to both, plotting in his youth to put it behind with a minimum of sacrifice or conflict. His ploy was both simple and effective: Go east, young man! He firmly refused to attend Stanford, as pampering family and persecuting peers assumed he should do, choosing Princeton instead. There no one knew him, he started over, a good egg called Joe. The name stuck, new friends lasted, and he never looked back. He left Princeton, class of '25, with a BA in history and a supportive circle—good connections, what an elite college was all about. He proceeded to study in a genteel style towards a doctorate from Columbia. Too good, of course; it being the latter 1920s, complications arose: lumber became a troubled commodity, the family's finances worsened, and his father's health declined—Franklin Trunkey McClintock realized he needed an income, and hence Joe gave up his academic aspirations, landing a good job in investment banking at Brown Brothers & Co with thanks to his acquired connections. With the crash of '29 and the ensuing Depression, corporate mergers and the 1933 Banking Act transferred that job to a newly formed Harriman, Ripley, & Co., my father's employer throughout my childhood and youth.</p>
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| <p class="item">My mother took a less predictable and more interesting path. Marguerite de Bruyn Kops, Margot for short, was born in 1903 in North Dakota, spending most of her infancy in the polio sanatorium, 200 miles away from her family, returning in 1905 to her home in Lawton, a tiny town in the north-east of the state. It was a new town, constructed by the railroad as a location for supplying locomotives with water for steam to power freight trains moving grain and other raw materials from Saskatchewan and Manitoba for production and distribution in the American mid-west. Her father, a 2nd generation immigrant from the Netherlands, and his wife, Annie, ran the Lawton general store, serving the 250 townspeople and the surrounding farming families there. Margot was the middle child of five, bright and active despite her disabilities from polio. She went to the University of North Dakota wanting to study mathematics but had to major in home economics—officially only male students could successfully do mathematics. Margot adapted , and completed her BA in 1925, along the way developing a flair for dress design and a long friendship with Marian Stepheson, a photography instructor. After Margot's graduation, she and Marion went to Paris to apprentice in Parisian couture, Marian in photography and Margot in design. Three years later, they disembarked in New York and Margot began establishing a career in the city's fashion industry. Ss department stores began to market upscale, ready-to-wear fashions for women, Margot's thwarted interest in mathematics paid off. Designing attractive suits and dresses that would fit the standard manikin, hand-sown, was important. But it was ore difficult to then transform the basic measurements in the resultant patterns to enable mass producing a ready-to-wear inventory properly scaled to fit off the rack the many different women shopping in stores across the nation. With these skills and an out-going personality she readily got well paid positions throughout the Depression.
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| <p class="item">It's embarrassing. At least I knew Margot and Joe had lives before my birth and found out how they got to New York. But for some reason, I never found out how they met and fell in love, if that's what they did before marrying in October, 1935. They gave themselves the wedding, no parents and little family involved, and a big party for friends and acquaintances at the Waldorf-Astoria. I think those might have mapped into several lightly interlocking circles a bit with the members of each deriving from the work and college experience of either Joe or Margot. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, making inferences back from my experience as an only child whose parents were older than usual, each with involved in their career. Worried that I might become overly shy, they made a point of including me in the social lives, and I became an observant participator. At any rate, I am unaware of a grand courtship between Margot and Joe, and I think friendship and the economic advantages of pooling two incomes in a place like Manhattan during the Depression would have had much to do with bringing their wedding about. It was neither a love match nor an arranged marriage, but a marriage arrangement that worked well until death did them part. Whether or not they had fully anticipated my arrival in 4 years as part of their arrangement, I can't be sure, but I'm very glad I made it there despite the hubbub of my arrival, and they have been most gracious, caring, and generous in including me in it thereafter. With that said, I'll resume my story.
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| <!-- , and both succeeded to get well-paid professional positions despite depression times, and to cultivate active social lives through which they met and married in October, 1935, celebrating with a memorable reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.
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| <p class="item">As we go along, I'll fill in how and why Margot got from North Dakota to New York, along with other things from them both. For now as I begin my story, I'll simply add that Margot had been born in Michigan Township in northeastern North Dakota on June 15th, 1903. In 1939, she was living in New York City, working near Herald Square in the Garment District, designing a line of junior-miss dresses and suits sold nationally in mid-scale department stores. and Joe, was known formally at the Wall Street investment bank, Harriman, Ripley, & Co. where he was a midlevel executive on financing large industrial projects through. Both Margot and Joe had gone to New York City to had been establishing themselves in their respective professions since 1925, meeting in the early '30s and marrying
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| <p class="item"> I fill in more about his past as appropriate as well.</p>
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| worked </p>
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| <p class="item"><u>Mother:</u> informally, .</p>
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| [[My Parents|More. . . .]]</p> | |
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| --><p class="year b1">1939 to 1942: A Prince of the Park</p>
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| <p class="item">I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment on Gramercy Park, which had a large terrace, a coveted view, and their routines of engaging work and gregarious lifestyle. For my first 3 years, that apartment, and the flow of activity that took place there, situated my initial lifeworld—a bunch of givens where I began to sleep and to eat and to walk and to talk, acquiring my initial efforts to cope with circumstances of time and place. The apartment was scaled and furnished, loosely Art Deco, for socializing among Depression era, upwardly-mobile professionals, circa 30 to 40 in age. It came with a rarity, a key to a private, block-sized space straddling Irving Place where I spent my time outdoors, a prince of the park, wheeled about by nanny in my carriage, sporting absurd finery and cooing with gushy bystanders. I have no actual memories of my life there then, but I like to think I would be having some reservations about it. Big-smile pictures of me dressed to the nines suggest someone learning to excessively please. And perhaps my cultivating a knack for quietly sousing myself on drinks carelessly set on low tables by standing guests intent in their conversations suggested a sophisticated despair in the making. From infancy on, we all adapt to our lifeworlds, working with their good and their bad, whatever those may be. At the age of 3, I had the basics was ready for a change with which I might turn active, a self-directing agent in a very different lifeworld. which, Thankfully, it came about.</p>
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| <p class="year b1">1942 to 1943: A Different Lifeworld.</p>
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| <p class="item">As I later heard it, in 1942, the austerities of the war and the constraints of out-grown living arrangements prompted my parents to change our living arrangements radically. I doubt that they explicitly consulted me in the matter, but I like to think that I had some subtle, tacit influence on the depth and extent of the changes they initiated. While we had lived there, the Gramercy Park apartment had not been the whole of my world, for Woz and I would accompany Margo and Joe to various places for short weekend visits and longer times in the summers of '40 and '41. I would experience those forays as transient departures from our urban routines, often pleasing but sometimes a little confusing—intimations of alternative lifeworlds. One destination seemed somewhat recurrent. And there, Margo and Joe didn't relax convivially as elsewhere they would. Instead, they busied themselves with projects in and about this strangely vacant house, while Woz, who had barely ever in her life been out of the city, nervously kept me too much aside from the action. Nevertheless, I would eye what was going on around me and with some excitement added "the farm" to my sparse vocabulary. In August, I had a little party for my 3rd birthday with my urban friends, whom I didn't really know, and shortly after that I learned that we were moving away from Gramercy Park to live fulltime at the farm.</p>
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| <p class="item">How might an energetic 3-year-old intuit the possibilities of life at the farm relative to nascent prospects set by his urban agenda? For my parents, adults, the prospect of moving to the farm came with continuities set in their well formed character and established patterns of activity. They had bought the farm for a song in a deeply depressed market 2 or 3 years before I was born. Making it into an attractive retreat weekends and summers had become their shared avocation, my father the planner and my mother the manager. My involvement came late, of course, and I could only begin as a passive participant in the endeavor. A picture surely captures such expectations. It showed an adult crowd partying on the back terrace at the farm, celebrating my baptism in a local Episcopal chapel, since often passed but never entered. I was in the center, an infant asleep, held awkwardly in the arms of my godfather, CEO of the investment bank for which my father worked, a person I had not seen before and would not see again.</p>
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| <p class="item">For my first 3 years, conventional necessities—<i>comme il faut</i>, the way it's spoused to be—structured my life, as they had structures the lives of my parents and the lifeworld they created. And on the surface, neither I nor they would have reason to expect things to become very different with the decision to live at the farm. The idiom, <i>comme il faut</i>, literally says "as it is necessary" and comes to refer to what is conventionally required because in settled social circles, many conventions take on an appearance of necessity, requiring those who will conduct themselves effectively to follow the conventional expectations astutely. But the phrase can turn very ironic when life necessities diverge from the social necessities. With the move to the farm, I became alert to these ironies as they arose and took advantage of them to center there, for better and for worse, my own independent lifeworld.</p>
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| <p class="year b1">1943 to 1945: Gaining Some Control</p>
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| <p class="item">We live life, each and all, in the face of necessities. Our powers of self-definition arise, not from the fortuitous absence of necessities, but from our ability to understand and to exercise opportunities to influence how they impinge on us purposefully.
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| <p class="item">I don't have actual memories of my emotions that this announcement triggered, but I'm sure they were emotions of hearty approval and eager anticipation. Now, for us as writer and reader to grasp the inner experience of what to me was taking place with the prospect of living at <i>the farm</i>, in contrast to living at <i>Gramercy Park,</i> let's pay attention to the actualities of it. To my parents, "the farm" would be an aspirational term common with urban folk who have resources — I'm quite sure, in a somewhat different way for my parents, we need to step back a bit Margo and Joe had bought the farm But I am sure that by the time it became home, I was ready to turn active, exploring the farm and making it my turf!</p>
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| <p class="year b1">1943 to 1948: The Farm @ Solebury, Pa.</p>
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| <p class="item">Let's set the new scene to sense how an energetic 3-year-old might, intuiting its possibilities relative to programmed and pampered prospects on Gramercy Park. You can find the small village of Solebury at a confusion of stop-signs where 5 country roads converge, about 2 hours south-west of Manhattan, a couple miles beyond the Delaware River, 7 or 8 upstream from historic Washington's Crossing. At the western edge of the village, the Farm occupies 65 acres of bucolic Bucks County land, up the face of a rolling hill, about half of it fallow or wooded, the other half cultivated in wheat, corn, or soy beans. The main house had been built of field-stone in spurts from the mid 1700's to the mid 1800's. It had a large attic floor beneath a sloping roof. The 2nd floor had 4 bedrooms, 2 small and 2 large with unused fireplaces, and 2 bathrooms. The main floor had a kitchen, a dining room with a large working fireplace, and a large living room with an even bigger fireplace, which also worked.<ref>Adjacent, a small square "spring house" stood, also built of field-stone, about one and a half stories high, with no windows, a pre-modern refrigerator powered by spring water flowing in, around a large circular stone in the center, and out to a nearby pond, keeping the butter, cheese and other creamery products safely cool whatever the season. </ref>Adjacent, most to important me, a big, working barn stood catty-corner 75 feet or so from the main house.</p>
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| <p class="item">Like the house, the barn had grown from the mid 1700s on. Its base was about 50 foot square, constructed from field-stone, about 3 stories high, with the back wall dug into the hill rising behind it. The front and back walls were faced with wooden planks, the side wall were stone work going all the way up, supporting the roof and interior structure. The ground to the back wall was built up to make a wide ramp to the 2nd floor, with high sliding doors so that heavy, bulky loads could be easily taken in filled with various animals, diverse tools, and lots of space, materials, and stuff to let imagination soar.</p>
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| <p class="item">I describe the farm at some length because I made my new home a crucial site of my self development for the next 10 years and more., They <br>I certainly was not aware whether or not my parents purposively planned it, but our moving fulltime to the farm created for me extraordinary opportunities for self-development.
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| but they each worked fulltime in their Manhattan offices with staffs to manage, projects to plan, and deadlines to meet.
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| <h3>Civic Humanism, 1960-1985</h3>
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| <h3>Digital Humanism, 1980-2005</h3>
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| <h3>Finishing up 2000-on</h3>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year">1959/60</td>
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| <td class="item">Excerpt from my undergraduate journal</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1960_from_undergraduate_journal.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year">1960/61</td>
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| <td class="item">Educational Content and the American Reality: An Inquiry into Secondary Education for Americans Living in Europe (Senior thesis)</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1961_senior_thesis_princeton.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year"></td>
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| <td class="item">'''June''': Graduated from Princeton University, with an A.B. degree and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Certificate, the Gale F. Johnston Prize in Public Affairs, and High Honors in the School of Public and International Affairs.</td>
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| <td class="pdf"></td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year"></td>
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| <td class="item">Princeton Undergraduate Transcript, 1957-61.</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1961_princeton_undergraduate_transcript.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year">1961/62</td>
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| <td class="item">'''Summer''': Managed the summer program at the American School in Switzerland ("Swiss Holiday")<br>'''September''': Began study at Columbia University towards an M.A. in History.<br>'''Fall''': paper (now lost) on Henry Adams for a Colloquium in American Intellectual History with Henry Steele Commager, then visiting professor.</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2011_flaneurs_of_the_fields.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year"></td>
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| <td class="item">'''April''': Draft M.A. Essays, "The Development of Concepts of Association in American Educational Thought" submitted and rejected by the faculty advisor. Arranged to switch to History and Education program with Lawrence A. Cremin as advisor.<br>September: Started work on Ph.D. on History and Education as a student in Columbia's International Fellows Program.</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1962_draft_ma_thesis.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year">1962/63</td>
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| <td class="item">"Notes from a Mad Man," Review of ''Education and the New America'' by James McClellan & Solon T. Kimball. Unpublished, submitted 12/17/1962 for the General Seminar (TF6000).</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1963_review_mad_man.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year"></td>
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| <td class="item">'''December''':The American Attack on UNESCO:1951-1957 (MA Essay, submitted 12_18_1963)</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1963_ma_thesis_unesco.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html"></td>
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| </tr>
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| </tr>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year">1980</td>
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| <td class="item">Citizens and Subjects: Educational Politics in<br>Historical Perspective</td>
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| <td class="html">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1980_citizens_and_subjects_1.pdf pdf1]</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1980_citizens_and_subjects_2_3.pdf pdf2]</td>
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| </tr>
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| <tr>
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| <td class="year">1980</td>
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| <td class="item">My case for promotion to full professor</td>
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| <td class="pdf">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1980_full_conventional.pdf pdf]</td>
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| <td class="html">[[Texts:1980_My_case_for_promotion_to_full_professor|html]]</td>
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| </tr>
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| </table>
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